It was like I wasn't a person to him. I understood that in the half second I had to understand anything. I'd stopped being a woman and become a shape that didn't belong, and behind that broken stare something locked onto me and decided what I was.
A threat. An empire's hand reaching into the dark to put him back in the pen.
"No," he said to me, or to the empire, or to whatever he saw where I stood. "Not again. Notyou."
He came across the kitchen fast. All the careful was gone, the ducked beams and tucked elbows and cups set down soft, andthere was just the speed and the weight, and his hand closed around my upper arm, his horns waving wild enough that one bump could gore me.
It was nothing. My arm was nothing in it. He could have folded me in half without trying.
You don't fight the whole hand. You'll lose. Drive at the thumb, the one weak place, turn your arm against it, step off his line.
My body did it on its own. A maroon hand had drilled the move into me by a workbench until I got it right. I twisted my arm against the joint of his thumb, dropped my weight out of the grip, and turned off the line of him. His hand closed on air. I was free, already moving, and some far-off astonished part of me had time to thinkit worked, the horrible drill workedbefore the rest of me hit the counter and grabbed the comm off the wall.
I didn't choose who to call. My hand hit the last thing the comm had reached, the redial, before the rest of me had a vote, and it was ringing before I remembered whose voice would answer it.
It connected on the second ring, the roar of the furnace behind it, and then a voice, low, the bottom dropping out of it the second he heard me breathing.
"Chloe."
"It's Zarcal," I said, flat and fast and small. "He came at me. I'm in the pantry, I locked the?—"
The first blow hit the door, and the entire wall jumped.
I dropped the comm. It clattered by my foot and I left it. The bar had already bent on the first hit, the wood bowing inward. I got down with my back to the shelving, knees to my chest, as small and as far from the door as the stone box would let me.
He hit it again, not knocking now, taking the wall apart. No shouting, no roaring, just the flat, awful work of it, a man dismantling a wall to get at the threat behind it. The timbersplit up high, and a knife of purple storm-light came through the crack.
Don't put yourself between him and the door. Hands where he can see them.
I kept my palms turned up and open on my knees, a foot of stone and a splitting door between us, and it made no sense, but Lorkin's voice in my ear was the only thing holding the roof on. I pressed my spine against the shelf and shook.
I wasn't the loud one now, the one with a joke for everything. I was someone much younger, someone tiny on a cold floor, counting the blows.
The door cracked across the middle. I could see a slice of him through it, his shoulder drawing back for the hit that would finish it, nobody home in his face.
And the front door of the cottage came off its hinges.
I didn't see Lorkin come in so much as feel the house take his weight, a second enormous body in the small space. Then he was between Zarcal and the broken pantry door, and he didn't draw back to hit. He went in low and wrapped his brother up.
I watched through the crack, half out of my mind, but I saw it plain. Lorkin wasn't trying to win. He was trying to hold. Zarcal got an arm loose and caught him across the jaw, and Lorkin took it. Took it and closed in again, giving nothing back. He got his arms around the heave of Zarcal's chest, pinned both those terrible arms to his sides, and bore him backward, talking the whole time, low, the way I'd seen him gentle a goat with its head caught in a fence.
"It's done, brother. The hold's clear. You got them out. Garrum's out, you carried him out." Zarcal bucked against him, and his feet skidded on the boards. "You're not there. You're home. I've got you."
Zarcal sagged. Lorkin took him down to the floor carefully, controlled and gentle with him even now, and put him underwith one short, hard movement I felt more than saw. Then it was quiet, just the furnace-roar coming tinny out of the dropped comm, two gigantic men on the floor, one out cold and one bleeding from the mouth.
For a second nobody moved.
Then Lorkin found the crack in the door and found me behind it, knees to my chest, hands still open and turned up like an idiot. He looked at me a beat longer than he needed to, and whatever was in it, I didn't have the room left to read.
"The bar," his voice was rough. "Can you lift it?"
I made my hands work and lifted it, and the broken door swung in. I didn't get up. I couldn't, yet, and he didn't come and haul me out. He stayed crouched over his brother, blood on his mouth, and his voice came careful and plain.
"Pick up the comm. Call Kazan. Tell him to come."
My hands shook so hard it took me three tries to get the redial right. I heard it start to ring.
And behind it, on the floor, Zarcal woke up.
